EDITORIAL

Inspect, Don't Invade

Colin Powell put his reputation on the line to give George W. Bush
the war he so desperately wants. Bush's poll numbers soar when the
talk is about fighting terrorism but the numbers tank when the talk
is about the economy, so despite the fact that Saddam Hussein and
Osama bin Laden were enemies before 9/11 and despite the advice of
the CIA as well as French and German diplomats that pressing for war
in Iraq would inflame Islamic radicals worldwide, the US secretary of
state soldiered on for the boss in his presentation to the United
Nations Security Council.

If the polls are to be believed, Powell succeeded in convincing a
majority of Americans that war with Iraq is justified. He was less
convincing with the rest of the world, but Bush and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld have made it clear that the US will go it alone if
necessary to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein and his "weapons of mass
destruction" (and gain control of Iraq's oilfields in the
process).

We wish we could believe that invading Iraq would solve the
problems. More likely the bombing of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq
to clear the way for the invasion will kill tens of thousands of
innocent Iraqi people, create hundreds of thousands of refugees,
plunge the Middle East into chaos and expand the radical Islamic
jihad against the western world.

US officials keep talking about the crisis of credibility with the
Security Council, where France threatens to veto military
intervention, and with NATO, after France, Germany and Belgium
blocked the alliance from reinforcing Turkey in anticipation of a
counterattack from Iraq. We should be concerned with US credibility
as Bush preposterously claims he has not made up his mind on going to
war, Rumsfeld repeatedly insults French and German efforts at
resolving the crisis through diplomacy and Powell not only undermines
UN inspection efforts but he strains to link secularist Saddam and
the Islamic fanatics of Al Qaeda when more credible Al Qaeda links
lead to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait and Qatar, our supposed
allies.

Powell also overreached when he described a "poison factory" run
by Ansar al Islam, the militant group that Powell linked both to
Saddam and to Al Qaeda. Reporters who toured the "poison factory"
found a primitive collection of buildings without plumbing and
powered only by a small generator. And it's in Kurdish territory in
northern Iraq, which is not controlled by Saddam, whom Ansar al Islam
oppose for his secular views.

The US has no use for the UN or NATO when they refuse to follow
Bush's bellicose lead. Our government continues to oppose the
International Criminal Court, which 89 nations, including
Afghanistan, have set up to prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes
against humanity. It seems as if the only international organization
whose prerogatives the Bush administration respects is the
sovereignty-snatching World Trade Organization.

As we wait for the jihad to strike again we learn that the Bush
administration is preparing a sequel to the USA PATRIOT Act that
would grant the government even broader powers to increase domestic
intelligence-gathering and surveillance while restricting access to
information and limiting judicial review. The Center for Public
Integrity obtained a copy of the draft legislation, labeled
"confidential," and posted it at its web site
(www.publicintegrity.org) along with an analysis.

Rumors about the bill, entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement
Act of 2003, had circulated around the Capitol for months, but
Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee who inquired about
the measure were told as recently as the week before it was leaked
that no such legislation was being planned. Spokeswoman Barbara
Comstock later told the Associated Press the Justice Department is
"continually considering anti-terrorism measures and would be
derelict if we were not doing so."

The original PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress in the hysteria
following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, sidestepped the Bill of
Rights as it gave the government broad new powers to use wiretaps,
electronic and computer eavesdropping, searches and the authority to
obtain a wide range of other information in its investigations.

According to the Center, PATRIOT II would, among other things,
prohibit disclosure of information regarding people detained as
terrorist suspects (allowing them to be "disappeared" into the
Homeland Security gulag) and prevent the Environmental Protection
Agency from distributing information to the public about nearby
companies' use of chemicals (gutting the right to know about
dangerous pollutants).

In addition, the measure would create a DNA database of "suspected
terrorists;" force suspects to prove why they should be released on
bail, rather than have the prosecution prove why they should be held;
and allow the deportation of US citizens who the government believes
have ties to terrorist groups.

Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, top Democrat on the House Judiciary
Committee, said the legislation "turns the Bill of Rights completely
on its head" and "constitutes yet another egregious blow to our
citizens' civil liberties." Bush and Ashcroft apparently were waiting
until the next terrorist attack to spring it on Congress. Send
pre-emptive contacts to your Congress members to stand up for civil
liberties. The rights you save may be your own!

Save the paper ballot

Election officials in many jurisdictions are too quick to throw
out paper ballots as voting becomes increasingly automated. Computers
are wonderful machines, but they can be manipulated in ways the
casual observer might never suspect. Voters should be very alarmed
that voting machine manufacturers tout their products without
assurances that votes will produce audit trails in case of disputed
elections.

Thom Hartmann details a few of those concerns in his article on
page 20. Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting, Ballot Tampering in
the 21st Century, to be published in May, writes on her web site
(www.blackboxvoting.com) that voting machine manufacturers and
testing labs are salted with vested interests, including active
politicians such as Sen. Chuck Hagel, corporate lobbyists and people
who have been prosecuted on charges of bribery and fraud. They are
using lobbying and political influence to influence purchase of
machines and specifications and regulations of their operation.

Computerized machines may make vote rigging possible on a scale
unimaginable to political bosses of generations past. "It's hard to
stuff more than a dozen ballot boxes in your trunk, and it's nigh-on
impossible to get 100,000 dead people to vote," Harris wrote. "But
with these machines, we sometimes lose hundreds of thousands of votes
in a single city!"

Rebecca Mercuri, an assistant professor of computer science at
Bryn Mawr College and another critic of electronic voting, also
strongly recommends that election officials refrain from procuring
any system that does not provide an indisputable paper ballot. See
her writings at (www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html).

Voters should demand that election officials reject "proprietary"
contracts which are supposed to protect "trade secrets" but also
prohibit a thorough inspection of voting machines, including computer
code, by public advocates. Most important, voters should demand of
their election officials that computerized voting produce paper
ballots to back up the electronic voting and allow a recount of
suspicious election results. All it takes is a printer connected to
the computer to produce a printout of the ballot, which the voter can
inspect and then place in the ballot box. In case of a voting
discrepancy, election judges can not only run the numbers on the
computer again, but they can haul out the paper ballots, count them
and see if the results match.

As writer Lynn Landes wrote last September, "when it comes to
elections in America, assume crooks are in control and then act
accordingly." (See EcoTalk.org/VotingSecurity.htm.) Demand a paper
ballot trail. -- JMC